In D and D 5th Edition, players must calculate and pay for lifestyle expenses, including food, drink, lodging, and other necessities. These expenses are calculated at the start of each week or month and include rent, equipment upkeep, ammo, clothing, food, and drink. Lifestyle expenses summarize the cost of living in a fantasy world, covering lodging, food, equipment maintenance, and other necessities.
During downtime, lifestyle expenses are essential as they can be used as a modifier for how successful characters are in their desired activities. Players must choose a lifestyle from the Expenses table and pay the price to sustain that lifestyle. The prices listed are per day, so if they wish to calculate the cost of their chosen lifestyle over a thirty-day period, multiply the listed price by 30.
The rules do not address how having a family affects lifestyle expenses, so players must talk with their DM (or players if they are the DM). Sometimes, downtime activity is enough to cover the costs of the chosen lifestyle or more. A player can choose to have their character live in a town, and some Avrae aliases allow players to pay for lifestyle expenses to earn Downtime Days (‘dt’) which are then paid for.
Lifestyle expenses are for a day or two or more off in a row, usually in a town. If characters are jumping from dungeon to dungeon, they may need to pay for lifestyle expenses to earn Downtime Days (‘dt’). The only direct game effect of living conditions is the expense involved, but living conditions can also determine some role-playing events.
In summary, D and D 5th Edition offers a comprehensive guide on how to calculate and pay for lifestyle expenses, including food, drink, lodging, and other necessities.
📹 How much is 1 Gold in REAL LIFE? D&D 5e Gold
How much is 1 gold in D&D actually worth? How to use Gold in D&D 5e ⏬ More Content ⏬ Become a Patron: …
Is 6 players too much D&D?
The majority of groups restrict the number of players to six or seven, with four or five being a common limit for tactical play. The optimal number of players is four, with a range of three to six being acceptable. While some Dungeon Masters are able to accommodate groups of between one and eight players, or seven or more players, larger groups can present certain challenges.
What is the most expensive ale?
International Beer Day 2023, celebrated on August 4, celebrates beers from all nations and cultures. The top five most expensive beers worldwide include Arctic Ale by Allsopp, Antarctic Nail Ale by Nail Brewing, Cantillon Loerik 1998 by Brewdog, and The End of History by Brewdog. These beers are priced between $503, 300 (Rs 4. 1 crore) and $1, 815 (Rs 1. 5 lakh), with the Arctic Ale by Allsopp being the most expensive at $503, 300. People worldwide celebrate the day by trying new beers and appreciating the best alcoholic brews worldwide.
How much does Ale cost in D&D?
The text suggests consuming a mug of ale, a hunk of cheese, and a loaf of bread. However, it also indicates that JavaScript is disabled or blocked by an extension and that cookies are not supported by the browser.
Is D&D an expensive hobby?
The price increase for future physical books in the tabletop hobby of gaming, including dice, miniatures, accessories, and new rulebooks, is expected to raise the barrier of entry for cost-conscious players and game masters. Wizards of the Coast expects continued backwards compatibility with existing 5E materials after the 2024 update and unchanged digital prices to help with accessibility. The new price will only apply to new products and the ability to carry forward existing books, while digital prices are not increasing.
How to get GP in D&D?
Adventurers are likely to excel in Wanton Violence, which can be a great way to earn GP without risking their health. To achieve this, one must have good Athletics, Acrobatics, and a high Constitution modifier. They can beat up to three random DCs between 7 and 27 and can make up to 200gp by engaging in pit fighting. Fighters and Barbarians can also use their rusty short swords to sell them to a merchant, who can get around half the list price for “found items” if they are not too banged up.
How do you choose a lifestyle in D&D?
The Expenses table allows players to choose a lifestyle and pay the cost to sustain it each week or month. The cost is calculated per day, so if you want to calculate the cost over a thirty-day period, multiply the listed price by 30. Lifestyle choices can have consequences, such as maintaining a wealthy lifestyle to make connections with the rich and powerful, or living frugally to avoid criminals but not make powerful connections.
The wretched lifestyle involves living in inhumane conditions, relying on the good graces of those better off, and facing violence, disease, and hunger. Other wretched people also covet their armor, weapons, and adventuring gear, which represent a fortune by their standards. Despite these challenges, the wretched lifestyle is often overlooked by most people.
Does gender matter in D&D?
Dungeons and Dragons typically does not have a mechanical effect on gender, but there have been some exceptions throughout the game’s history. In the original 1974 version, no special rules were implemented for female characters, and male pronouns and terms were used. However, in Dragon 3 (Oct 1976), special rules were introduced for female characters, including lower Strength scores and a Beauty stat from 2-20 instead of Charisma. Women also have unique class abilities and level titles.
Does lifestyle matter in D&D?
At the commencement of each week, each PC selects a lifestyle, remunerating the associated cost in gold. The selection of a less expensive lifestyle entails the imposition of penalties, whereas the selection of a more expensive lifestyle yields bonuses.
How much money should players start with DND?
In Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, players often struggle with starting gold and armor costs. The official rules state that players can choose between a random amount of starting gold and the starting gold and equipment from their background and class. The choice between these methods is a bit finicky, but it is essential to understand the basics.
Random Starting Gold is a method where players make D4 rolls based on their starting class to determine their initial wealth. This method is typically riskier, as players may roll more gold but the average gold rolls will be similar or less than taking the basic starting equipment option. Players should make these rolls in front of their DM, as it is typically riskier.
In summary, starting gold in Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition is a complex process that players must navigate to determine their starting gold and armor costs. It is essential to understand the rules and the complexities of each method to ensure a smooth and successful character creation experience.
Is 1 GP a lot in D&D?
Gold pieces (GP) are commonly used by adventurers and skilled artisans to purchase items like spears, rope, arrows, trail rations, and goats. They are the standard measure for wealth and item costs, with items listed in rulebooks unless they cost less than a gold piece. NPCs typically operate in smaller denominations, as most day-to-day goods cost less than a gold piece. Coins have different values, with copper pieces (CP) being the smallest common denomination, silver pieces (SP) worth 10 copper pieces, gold pieces (GP) worth 10 silver pieces, and platinum pieces (PP) worth 10 gold pieces.
Are there cigarettes in D&D?
Cigarettes are typically sold in packages of 20 or in cigars, which can be up to 10 times more expensive and come in boxes of 10. The initial point of Constitution damage is one point deducted from the player’s total as the tobacco is dragged.
📹 How to make gold matter in dnd
My system is silver dominated, the average person living on 1sp per day. The phb prices for mundane items are changed from gold to silver, so an item costing 5 gp would cost 5sp instead. This makes gold seem much more valuable and worth delving into potentially lethal scenarios. I also have a lot more things for players to buy such as training, one time use inventions and magic items, and an alchemy and crafting system for players to dump thousands of gold into to make unique and fun potions and items. This system also make the player who drops a sack of gold on the table at a bar feel like a king among urchins.
I use the same conversion rate. It’s important to establish this at the beginning of the campaign. I emphasize this at character creation. When someone starts with 10 gold, I point out that it is the same as walking around with $1,000 on you. They always feel better prepared after learning that; realizing that their character has everything a legit adventurer would need. I also tend to only use copper and silver for the first few levels. I tell the group that it says 10 gp, but it’s whatever mix you need to pay for things. This also makes the differences between Tier 1 and Tier 2 much more pronounce.
That’s how I did money’s value in dnd and that’s how my old DM did it and his DM before him, 1cp = 1$. That’s the simplest way to do it. However, if you did it historically, as I kinda do now. I compared it to the value of a bushel (60lb) of wheat someone could buy in a week. So for example a tenant farmer (serf) in England in the 14th century makes about 1.6 (6.5d or pence per bushel) bushels of grain every week on a salary of 9.23d a week (2d a day). And a Roman tenant farmer during the time of Diocletian has a wheat buying ratio of like 1.5 (100 denarii for half a (30lb) bushel) on 150 denarii a week (21 denarii a day). So in dnd a peasant farmer with a wheat buying power of 1.5 would make about 9sp a week (1.3sp a day) as wheat costs 6sp a bushel. This would make everything basically costs silver and only really expensive things would cost a gold. So if a Broadsword costs 20gp that would make it the equivalent of 33.4 bushels of wheat. And if you are wondering. In our time a bushel cost about $6, so our wheat buying power is like 166.7 for someone working full time for 25$/h. If you make 15$/h and work full time your’s is 100. I’m such a fucking nerd.
The problem with this approach is it assumes the same relative costs of goods in the middle-ages-based fantasy world and our modern world. And that just does not track. We have mass production. We have international shipping. We have a commodified real estate market. I can buy 50 g of whole nutmeg for less than $3. So $30 for half a kilo. One source I found showed half a kilo of nutmeg being traded in the 14th century for three sheep and a cow. A dairy cow alone these days can go from $800 to $3,000 or so, let alone the price of the three goats.
It’s funny if you follow the Core Rules. An average person spends 1sp per day, that are 3gp per month therefore 36gp a year. A Treasure Hoard 0-4 gives an adventurer about 250gp, enough for 6 years without working. A Treasure Hoard 5-10 gives an adventurer over 3000gp, enough for over 80 years. Every smart adventurer would retire at level 5.
You conversion rate seems really high. That’s 1 gp or $100 for a single arrow. A backpack would cost 2 gp, or $200. A blanket would be 5 sp / $50, a handaxe would be 5 gp or $500, and a lute would be 35 gp or $3,500. How would anyone ever afford to play a lute? This just seems really high, but then, 5e doesn’t have consistent pricing anyway.
I think I used the actual in game cost of a loaf of bread to calculate how much a Cooper, silver, and gold would be. It ended up being around $2.5 for a Cooper, $25 for a silver, $250 for gold, and $2500 to $3000 for platinum. I had a range for platinum because it’s much harder to work with than the other metals.
I’d be keen to know about the experiences of someone who’s tried to balance a halfway realistic ancient or medieval economy (using different systems of coinage issued by different polities, some of which are more trusted for their metal content and the power of the state behind it than others – and (depending on which academics and arguments you agree with) money in general having far less utility in rural, agricultural communities than in cities and centres of resource production) with player convenience. I mean, for one thing, the typical D&D gameplay loop relies on money retaining its value over time but your average merchant may decide they don’t trust your gold coins from a long-dead kingdom kept for hundreds of years in a dragon’s hoard!
Your teaching degree is showing, Coach. Side note, I have a home-brew magic wallet, which is so ubiquitous in my game worlds that everyone is assumed to have one. It holds up to 200 gold’s worth of currency, and it will magically convert all currency in to the most convenient coinage. You can put 100 copper in to it, and pull out a single gold or ten silver. Anything beyond that 200g (per player) limit, and we need to start tracking the coinage and weight.
I understand keeping it simple by just putting it in one coin and obviously that’s gold. There is, of course, a lot of merit to keeping it simple. But as a counter argument, it is useful if to use a variety of treasure if you run encumbrance and I like encumbrance. Why? Because DnD as originally played had a resource management component to it. We managed light, food, weight, hit points, rest, spells, and tools (picks, pulleys, rope). If your players like to be challenged as players, this is another way to add challenging elements. If they beat the the Dragon the treasure itself becomes a challenge. How do you get a 200,,000 silver pieces out before its plundered or grabs the attention of another Dragon when it’s literally a ton in weight? I understand many find this a tedious element to be set aside for more “exciting” elements of the game but for me the game gets repetitive and less exciting when you take challenging even though mundane elements out. Its fun to see the Players problem solving skills come out and see what choices they make to mitigate an impossible but low consequence scenario.
In my setting I use the Silver Standard, meaning that that silver coins are the default coinage for most people. By using the Silver Standard it still makes Silver and sometimes Copper coins still worthwhile. This makes gold very worthwhile, and when PCs get things in gold coins they start paying attention. My conversion rate is that someone who earns 1 silver a day equals $10k in USD at the end of the year. So someone who earns 5 Silver a day earns $50k a year, and someone who earns 1 gold a day is a someone that makes $100k a year. Using my spreadsheet that makes 1 copper worth around $3, which tracks for a ale or cheap meal at the local tavern. So in ways this has played out at the table has been that in the opening scene of a campaign a rich asshole guild master flicks a gold piece at the tavern server, and you know that’s basically a little over $250, it changes the way the interaction looks. The party also intercepted a group of rebels who had a crate of platinum trade bars from the royal mint. Now they didn’t even know there were platinum coins because obviously regular folk don’t have access to platinum, and there are even small towns where gold isn’t accepted by shopkeepers. This drove home how much money they had just stumbled upon and they lost their minds.
Bold of you to try fixing D&D economy in 6 minutes when no one’s been able to do it in over 40 years. It’s generally assumed magic broke everything, and so we suspend our disbelief. When you take magic out of the equation, D&D’s economy is BROKEN AF, and there is no viable solution to pricing its items to real world values without going through each and every item one at a time. It costs between 7 copper and 4 gold to stay at an in; so possibly $7 – $400 or $0.07 – $4, depending on whether you have 1 gold = $1 or $100 in your game. If you think about renting sleeping space in medieval times, the latter example actually makes the more sense, but then a sword is suddenly only $15, when in reality it would cost between 1 pound up to 1 pound and 8 shillings around 1400 CE, which is about the equivalent buying power of 600-1000 USD today (1 pence in 1400 = about 2.5 modern Euros/Dollars, 20 pence to 1 shilling, and 12 shillings to 1 pound). It only gets worse with magic items. You could charge between 5,000gp and 50,000gp for a Manual of Gainful Exercise (which you only get to use once), well over 50,000gp for +3 armor… but a Helm of Teleportation costs only between 500gp-5000gp and would allow you to ditch the ranger and never pay for horses ever again.
For my world, I’m devising a not very realistic but a meaningful currency system that probably cannot work – and its collapse can be a plot device. So, in it, money basically has religious meaning, gold representing the sun, silver the three moons, and copper the very world people live on, the earth, the dirt. Because of the three moons, the ratings are three to one, but gold and copper have narrow functions and strictly controlled emission – gold is used for magic purpchases and copper for buying food and other stuff from lowly people at pretty poor prices, which allows silver, which is central to the monetary system, to flourish. It makes cities ever richer but makes lowly people either swarm cities or breed hatred towards them I understand it cannot work economically for long, so again, my players might witness is collapse and even take part in it, at whatever side they choose. By the way, for large amounts of coin, kind of bank notes are already present, although they’re not as popular yet (the setting is closer to renaissance than dark ages). It’s convenient but risky: adventurers should cling to their paper assets as they would to life itself. These papers are useless for robbers because of individual magic signatures but their loss is a great damage to your funds, so said robbers act anyway, just in a different fashion, requiring ransom for the papers they extort (or simply for someone’s life)
I could not agree more! Their is nothing I hate more then the prices of things in D&D! It makes no sense to me that people walk around with thousand and thousand of gold and platinum coins. My players are level 12 and they still never have enough money for everything that they want because otherwise it has no meaning as a reward. If they find 150 gold that is still a ton for them at level 12 but because of that I have to change the prices of every spell and everything else which is annoying -.-
I am currently creating an economy for a game I’m designing, and have been doing loads of research. This system is nice, as it is relatively easy. However, the prices do not take into account a non-industrialized economy of scale. If you consider this is feudal economy, pre-mercantilism and pre-capitalisms, then simple goods will cost a fortune in comparison. But, I do like the elegance.
Personally for my games I take a different conversion from each coin. Instead of moving in tens I go for hundred. 100cp = 1 sp. It makes is so that gold feels more unique and I just convert everything in RAW to silver, then back to gold if the number is too high. I never liked having the most mundane of things costing gold pieces and leaving silver or copper as useless. I like that if a player generally uses gold it means they have trascended the regular adventurer. Peasants should not have flows of gold for everything they do and a regular inkeeper should only have a few gold pieces at most. Not an entire coffer. But then again, it’s just my opinion. My first game with this three types was Dragon Age Origins and I liked that gold pieces were rare. (I think that without exploits you couldn’t have more than 300 in one run).
So a 50 gp run-of-the-mill common-as-dirt Potion of Healing is actually 5,000 bucks. Quite an investment to chug-a-lug in a couple of seconds when you look at it like that. And crafters can make them in a day, getting 2,500 bucks profit on them. No wonder there’s massive inflationary pressures whenever adventurers are around!
I did an entire economy rework for my TTRPG, Celestia. Even your system is based on dollars, which shows huge inflation as change is pointless. xD I go back and look at real world pricing 500ish years ago, basing copper (or sometimes iron) coins against pennies. But a loaf of bread ‘only’ costs a dime or maybe 15-20 cents for something a bit classier or fresher. Silver is more inline with a dollar and gold more inline with 100 dollar bills. So peasants have silver and copper commonly, while nobles operate on silver and gold. Most people didn’t even buy houses. Horses, cows, and oxen were often some of the most expensive things commoners owned.
This is the GM pit fall that should be avoided at all costs. It is simpler to keep potion, scroll, real estate, services costs consistent throughout the game world. Even say when running spelljammer and players are going to different worlds. Best to keep things simple. And maybe sometimes have the price gouging merchant when he knows he is the only source for these goods within 100 million miles, and then players know that NPC is being a douche. Simple fix write up a little table for your game world on how much expensive things costs so players know what they can spend there money then as a GM you know how much treasure you are giving out, and what goods become available to players. SImple, and then players are not constantly asking or hoarding coin because they never ask, and never know what to spend coin on.
I’ve been thinking 1 copper as 1 Swedish crown (being a Swede), which would make 1 silver 1 dollar instead.. Looking at the PBH, a “modest lifestyle” is 1 gp per day, which I’m wondering if it makes sense to be 10 dollars or 100 dollars. I myself am probably living a modest lifestyle, and it amounts to maybe 20 dollars a day.. and if we think back in medieval times, I would expect smaller amounts to pay for more, too. But in general, I do very much agree with connecting dnd money to real money to get a sense of what its actual worth is for the people in the game
This is one of the things I am tackling in my game coach. Mine is 100 copper = 1 silver, 100 silver = 1 gold. The PCs are now level 6 and have just accrued over 1 gold. I award hundreds of copper in chests and 10-50silver. Only started even giving silver as a reward at around level 2-3. The players were excited earning their first gold!
I add Iron coins into the mix. 1 Copper = 10 cents, so 1 Iron Coin = 1 dollar, 1 Silver Coin = 10 Dollars, 1 Gold Coin = 100 Dollars, but also Trade Bars (ingots of material) where a trade ingot has enough material to mint 20 coins of its specific type, meaning a Silver Trade Bar = 20 Silver Coins = 200 dollars. But some of my in-game civilizations don’t use those coins, some use Jade Rings, another has access to banking systems so they also add bank notes for coin values into the mix, another trades exclusively in gemstones for currency meaning if my players go to a different continent they might not necessarily be able to buy something and need to build up their local currency. This way my players aren’t necessarily incredibly wealthy everywhere they go.
I remember looking at some tables and charts on the costs of goods in the 1800’s United States a while back. If gold was $1, silver was 10 cents, and copper was a cent a piece, the numbers actually came out to something pretty reasonable. It would take some time to do a little research but, it made 100gp look like quite a payday when your average wage earner earned anywhere from 2-16gp per week. DC’s method is waaaaay easier tho lol
I use 1 silver = 1 day’s average wages for an unskilled laborer. US minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, normal expected shifts are 8 hours. 1 silver ≈ $58, baseline approximation. Given a tendency to view our culture as undervaluing work, etc, I’m more inclined to roll up than down. Given a preference for round numbers, if I do so, I’d probably make 1 silver = $100, meaning a copper piece is worth $10 and a gold piece is worth $1000, which feels right to me.
The solution is to stop treating silver and gold as the CURRENCY The currency should be Guild Marks (pic ur own name) Everything should be priced in Guild Marks A gold coin is the equivalent of 100 guild marks If u think the inn for the night is $100 Then in the game it is 100 Guild Marks Or 1 gold coin or 10 silver. 1guild mark = 1 $ € or £ Price everything in Guild Marks Then there is no more conversions to be made
I actually don’t mind math so I somewhat agree although I feel gold should be the last currency used and it should be relatively hard to come by because its worth so much. So I say: 1 copper most common items 100 copper = 1 silver 50 silver = 1 gold 20 gold = 1 platinum Believe me I know its alot of math but it makes it so that the main currency isnt gold also it encourages more trade so instead of hording magical weapons they’re more likely to trade old magic items for new ones.
For me a copper is 10c. silver is 1$ and gold is 10$. 5lbs of gold is 250coins or 2500k in $ Yes gold is worth less, but it makes sense when looking at the prices in the basic rules. A Breastplate is 400gold meaning 4k$ as opposed to the 40k TDC is suggesting. Grappling hook is 20$, greataxe is 300$, greatsword is 500$. It just makes sense to me
I ran this premade campaign setting called “The hugest dungeon in the world” ( name changed from the real name). It was very hard to leave. When the PCs started to rack up GPs and non magic gems. One of my players stated after finding a huge sum of GP “Worthless, worthless gold yea” They needed food, water necessary things living beings with a digestive track need. I had to introduce roving merchants( where they got the supplies to sell is anyone’s guess) Thanks Dungeon coach. I really like your ideas.
My campaign (a premade campaign) setting and the big sandboxish elements I put into it. I’ve been toying with the idea that there is this evil, greedy mercantile and lumber consortium ( licenses, permits, bribes, fees, taxes) The MLC knows they have a captive audience in the remote village and that they have a lock on the economy. Using the guards and a small merc company to enforce it. So, I’m thinking I may use a fiat currency “village promissory note”( lesser value with increasing inflation) and the new “bank of village” which will hold all the gold they slowly embezzling the gold and begin to transport it back to the big city.They can tax anybody they want including the party along with the rest of the farmers, tradesmen and common folk. How can the heroes put a stop to this and build the economic status to bring in honest merchants, tradesmen, artisans, investors from around the outlying areas? They pull the loot from the massive, deadly dungeon( not to mention bandits, and other monsters who will rob them if not outright kill them as soon as they leave the dungeon) with bulging coffers. How can they find allies in the area? Will they secretly hoard it, hide it? Use it to change the village? Gold will be useful. Is this idea a good or bad idea? Too close to RL shenanigans?
I use a similar system but divided by 10. So a copper is $0.10, a silver is $10, and a gold is $10, A platimun is $100 and only nobles use them My reasoning is that a Shortsword, based on the PHB would be $100, which might be cheap for our standards but in a world with monsters and melee fights, there should be a lot of pople making swords which drives the price down. I also make my healing potions a lot cheaper, only 5GP which would be $50 (in line with the phb if you only pay your PCs with gold). I generally pay them with silver for the fist couple of levels. (their first mission paid them 10SP and whatever they could haggle. I leave most prices as they show in the PHB his is how I price magic items Common: 10-50gp Uncommon: 50-250gp Rare: 250-1000gp Very rare: 1000-?? gp
I find using 1cp = $1 so 1gp = $100 works out really well for general approximation. When I first realized this I looked at the the cost of living chart and realized that it worked out pretty well to reality. Aristocrats are spending over $365,000 a year. Wealthy spend $146,000 a year. Comfortable spend $73,000 a year. Modest spend $36,500 per year. Lower then that and they start to feel a little bit to low for me but maybe I’m just looking at those numbers from a place of privilege.
In my games I stick with copper = $1, silver = $10, gold = $100. It makes sense to my that an average earning a day for middle class is 1 gold, which works out in modern calculations as $12.40 per hour for an 8 hour day and is easy to understand in 2000 earnings as a reasonable to low wage (let’s not dive into politics and living wages). The numbers can be stretched a bit to 1 gold a day, a silver per hour (assuming a 10 hour day in a more middle ages setting), and thinking in time makes the length of a job easier to calculate prices for as well and maintaining a standard in places where prices would be different (a kingdom with inflation might pay 1.5 silver an hour making the metric $15 per hour).
I actually use the currency system from He Who Fights With Monsters. Money is part of the tier system. Bronze tier monsters 0-4 CR drop bronze coins. Items you would need to buy are priced in bronze. The other thing is money isn’t made of metal. They are distilled magic so when making an item costs 400 bronze it’s literally consuming those coins to break down for the magic that makes the enchantment.
I was thinking along the same lines as you. This also lets electrum be more usable as $50, and the average person might be using smaller coins of the realm like pennies, quarters, and bits (8 to a copper). It does make some exchanges see high (a gold for an ale?) and some a tad low (2 silvers for a room for the night), but locations and inflation do make things vary. I some times do wish there was a coin for $5, and the alloy billon (mostly copper and silver) is usable (electrum is silver and gold after all, setting precedent), it just sounds too much like billion or bullion.
i just simplify it in my game for 1g increments; no copper, silver, platinum, etc. just gold. the players in my current campaign are level 13, and they get up to about 10k gold sometimes, but i give them plenty to spend it on; training, donations to victims of the campaign, consumables, crafting, etc. I hate the complexity of all of the denominations of currency. just seems like an overcomplication
The thing about gold is that you can not and should not tie it to the real value of gold in real life. Fantasy worlds do not work like the real world. Gold in the game is just a reward for the players. The issue with gold in 5e is not the amount but the lack of things to buy with it. If you don’t have money sinks 5000 gp is a lot. When you have a system where upgrading your sword to an adequate level cost 50.000gp. 5.000 gp isn’t that much anymore. And finding a treasure with 800gp that you have to split 4 ways isn’t that much. Gold in a game should only be considered based on the game itself. You shouldn’t think of what the equivalent is to the real world. You should only think about the game mechanics as money is just another game mechanic.
This system doesn’t work for a few reasons. One is how currency works in the real world, this means that there’s kind of a minimum price for things based on the availability of the currency. Another is how we produce stuff here versus a medieval setting. An empty book here is pretty cheap, but in medieval setting it’s more expensive, but this doesn’t carry over well at all. For example a candle is 1cp, so $1. But a book is 25gp, so $2500? A blanket is 5sp, so $50? A shovel for $200? A spyglass for $100000? A cow for $1000? Put simply your conversion works for small things, and certain big things like a small house. But most of the in-between things? Not a chance. And it doesn’t work in game either. Supply of blacksmithied goods should be relatively cheap, whereas I could see a book being more expensive due to the need for the items in the world, but they aren’t priced that way. This also fucks up in terms of the packs from your class equipment, these do not have things worth $4000 in them. Put simply ti’s doesn’t work and I don’t understand why you need it to work, there are plenty of analogues for things in the rules as is that work pretty well (I’ve done the maths). If you wanna buy materials to make something it is doable if you wanna do the maths, and if you don’t then make it up off something with approximate value, like some armour or a small house.
most games dont need any economy. Instead of gold just determine players wealth and they can buy anything from that category. then there is the Gold = EXP system I prefer a complex system so I make heavy use of downtime to earn an income, determine expenses and have players take care of their characters private lives.
Hey everybody, First of all, thanks for perusal and leaving comments on your thoughts. A lot of you brought up using copper and silver. To be honest, that is something that I forgot to mention since my play group hasn’t used those currencies for years. haha We figured that copper, silver, and gold are the same as pennies, dimes, and dollars (or on a higher scale 1 dollar bills, 10 dollar bills, and 100 dollar bills) so we simplified it down to just be the one currency, gold. This is a prime example of different play styles at different tables and I forgot to bring this up. Hopefully my main point, to make sure that everyone is on the same page about the value of whatever your currency you use, still came through. Again, thanks for perusal and I appreciate everyone for sharing how they deal with their economy! ok bye
Put more emphasis on copper and silver. Make it so poor/most common people do most transactions in copper, and then richer trader/educated people use more silver, and only noble people have easy access to gold. Then it makes it clear that gold is really valuable and any transaction made in gold will feel special. Going in an inn and paying your nights and meals with one gold should make you pass for a rich ass traveller, and put emphasis on the taverner’s reaction to seeing a gold, like he doesn’t see that often. That, plus setting down the cost of things, should do the trick. That’s what we do in the campaigns i play in.
This is why I use a converted currency system for my campaigns: 100 copper is 1 silver, 100 silver is 1 gold, and 100 gold is a platinum. It makes it so that a copper piece is basically just a penny that makes up a single dollar (silver), and it didnt make sense to me that gold, this beautiful, austere, symbol of wealth is the “basic unit of currency.” So in my games, we basically treat copper as pennies, quarters, and dimes, silver as dollars, gold as hundred dollar bills, and platinum as basically a blank check in terms of rarity and use
In my settings, 1 Copper is about a $1 in purchasing power and I scale up my coins by a factor of 10 (10c = 1s, 10s = 1g, 10g = 1p). Thus, commoners deal in copper and rarely silver, merchants deal in silver and rarely gold, nobles deal in silver and gold, and kingdoms deal in gold and platinum. It helps a lot to think in this scope for my DMing, with the other big element I ask myself is “how much skilled effort went into this product?” Automation has made pricing so much harder to figure out with how much it changed the amount of work we have to do to make things.
One of the main things that threw me was how low the coin values are. 10 Copper = 1 Silver 10 Silver = 1 Gold 10 Gold = 1 Platinum 2 copper = one beer. The village drunk had 5 beers. That’s 1 silver. The village drunk does this for 10 days, that’s a gold. In a month it’s a platinum. It’s so easy to jump over to the next tier that it feels silly having 4 levels of money. It’s really small numbers which makes it really hard to make the coins feel worth it. I’ve not really thought too much about it- until I tried running Mad Mage. The idea I had was that the players would go down into the dungeon for fame, riches, magical items and the sort. I started off being like ‘Limited items, you have scraps’. They found a magic item or two, went up to the surface where- in the book- they could sell for 50 platinum… they bought the best gear they could then were like ‘Wait, is there any reason why we should go back down? We have like… a ton of gold and such…’ They’ve gone back down out of pure ‘Well, we want to play the campaign’ energy, but it felt kinda weird.
Perhaps a good place to start is by asking “how much does a common unskilled laborer need to make per day to live”? That would include at least one if not two meals and a roof, with enough left over to replace clothing or crude tools once a month or so. Anything below that amount is ‘poor or poverty’, and more is moving up the social standing ladder. Then start adding to this by asking what does a “bouncer” or thug or guard make? What does a common soldier make if they enlist? Peasants can subsist on their land, but must yield a portion to their Lord — what does a parcel of land allow in produce, and how much less spendable cash do peasants have than common laborers, and so on. I think you will find that an economy is better served on a silver standard than a gold standard, and only middle and upper class persons have any gold at all. By the time you work in taxes and tithes, it is easy to see why 100 gold is a lot, and thousands is insanely rich. Also, Skilled Labor and products that result from it (like Armor and such) is expensive, costing tens and hundreds of silvers if not thousands. Financing a standing army is insanely expensive. And so on.
I agree to just equate the coin to your own local currency. However, use copper to the lowest spendable value. So in US a copper is a dollar and a silver is 10 and a gold is 100. Poor places don’t reward you in gold, but a reputation or a favor can go a long way. Its easier for my mind to rationalize the gold as a 100 dollars because it makes magic items so much more valuable as they would be. I guess 500 dollars is still pretty expensive though. But I also look at coppers and recognize that they should also be of value so that the party values gold more.
I’ve been dming a pirate themed campaign, early in the campaign the party’s Rogue discovered that he was the heir to a kingdom so he fell into wealth. 30-40 thousand gold. A couple sessions later, I gave the party a chance to buy a bigger and stronger ship that cost 18,000 gold. A stronger ship was beneficial to the future of the campaign, so it was rewarding and they enjoyed customizing the ship. The party’s ship is their base of operations, since they’re always traveling (the world is primarily made of islands) so upgrading it felt awesome for them.
Gold is VERY important in the TSR editions of D&D( 1e, Basic/Expert, BECMI, 2e). Gold=xp. Its exploration and adventure heavy. Avoiding combat if you can. The players had to work together using their wits to overcome the obstacles and challenges within the world to survive, not your charactersheet. Gold was how you earned those better weapons and armour ( as opposed to starting out with the best weapons and armour), built strongholds, wizard towers, your own lair. Raised armies and conquered territories. When Wotc took over, D&D became an entirely different game altogether. Slaying monsters=xp. It became more of a superhero, combat focused game. Gold=xp completely changes the way the game is played. The D&D versions being played today, are far removed from the game they see being played in Stranger Things, or the golden-era of D&D in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Something that requires a bit more math as well but is insanely useful is also having your currency evenly divisible by both 2 and 3. This means that cash can easely be divided by the number of players. And if you still get an uneven number you can always add a pool of cash for the party to facilitate the division. If you got 5 pcs add 1/6th of the rewards to a communal cash pool to pay for room and board for example. Another thing you can do is have them hire the people to help support an adventuring party. In older editions of DnD it was expected that most parties would have hirelings, workers and beasts of burden to help them haul arround their loot. Having these payed workers also helps you keep in mind how much things should cost since their cost of living would be factored in. Basically having your party running an adventuring caravan. Plus the hirelings and workers can easely serve as a diegetic way to keep backup characters for your party. They don’t meet a random stranger in the next Tavern to fill in for Lothal the Barbarian. Instead Dave the Angry Woodcutter that’s been with the caravan for 3 years and dealt with all the bullshit and adventuring party attracts and is ready to take out all that rage in some meat instead of firewood!
Thank you. This is a helpful discussion. The problem is that there is no economy in DnD. No market values of anything. No real limits on the amount of gold that is circulating. Another solution is to pick a functioning medieval economy, such as the Byzantine Empire. How much could a gold coin purchase? How easy was it to put your hands on a gold coin. I’ve tried to solve this problem by using “The Silver Standard” and then saying that 100 coppers = 1 silver and 1000 silvers equal 1 gold. In one campaign that I ran, it was understood that only nobility and rich merchant dealt in Gold pieces.
This is a topic I have struggled with for many years… probably one of the things that bothers me the most about D&D… going all the way back to Treasure Type tables where some monster lairs could randomly contain thousands of gold pieces. That said, while I appreciate your idea and approach, in my opinion, I can foresee an issue with making a gold piece equivalent to a dollar. The trouble with this is that it necessarily scales down silver and copper, which essentially makes those coins valueless – especially after a few levels. I think gold should be in less circulation than silver or copper… this makes gold rarer, as it should be. A serf working in a field shouldn’t be paid with gold pieces – that just seems weird to me that peasants are walking around with gold (even if it’s only a few coins). If peasants have gold coins, then who is walking around with silver? Children maybe? Then who is walking around with copper? I think it makes more sense to start with copper as the baseline currency, where most shops in a small hamlet almost exclusively have copper in the till save for maybe a few silver pieces. In fact, showing up with gold might create a problem for the store owner as he may not be able to provide change for the gold. I would make gold more common in bigger towns or cities, but in mid-sized towns or smaller, a silver piece might be the most valuable coin a villager has ever seen. Thanks for posting! You’ve inspired me to try to sort this out for my group (again).
With this in mind, I took a look at my game and the extended shop list I’m using and the rewards in the modules and decided on 1 GP = 5 USD. It already feels more intuitive to look at. We do use CP and SP (and at least acknowledge EP) and simple shop items like candles or cups costing a few nickels works out
I have local currencies, the silver from one lord can be more valuable than another lords, or that Dimas coins are not welcome here, so the party had to find a blacksmith to melt the coin so someone can accept it, but later outside the town they would encounter an NPC that only accepts the Dimas coins in exchange for information.
Simple solution is to make gold a requirement for leveling up. 1 xp = 1 gold piece for leveling purposes. Every dnd enemy has xp, so give rewards from quest givers for a certain amount of enemies slain. Treasure has monetary value, so provide that exchange after every session—tabulate what in your prep the group got and what they missed and give them the gold budget. You’ll be the “bank” for their earnings in the game, which will keep them coming back for more! Players can’t hoard their gold without harming their leveling, and players are incentivized to dungeon delve to train for higher levels. Gold must be spent to level—wizards take classes, warlocks pay their patrons, clerics donate, barbarians carouse on the town and fighters pay for training and armor maintenance. Thieves pay their boss’s boss and pocket a bit on the side if they can sneak it. Another important part is not just having a “base” but having an impact on the community. You’re a paladin? Your gold helps buy soldiers to protect the town where you are. Thieves have guilds, monks have monasteries, and wizards can be patrons of libraries. All of these can have in-game benefits of course, but the real goal is to make your players feel like they are becoming part of the fabric of the community.
The way I started handling gold in my 5e games is by requiring pcs to purchase xp at a rate of 1gp per xp (think of it like paying for training). That coupled with domain-level play (excellent suggestion of Strongholds & Followers) has helped balance gold in 5e for my group (we always found that pcs had too much gold and nothing to spend it on).
I have always played with fantasy economies being two-tier. Gold is the bottom tier, it’s the currency of the masses. So even large sums of gold may be useful if you are trying to raise an army or build a castle, or for an adventurer to commission masterwork arms and armor. But you’re unlikely to find anyone who is willing to part with magic items (beyond the lowest level consumables such as potions) for gold, at least not at prices that are highly inflated. So when it comes to the really valuable items that adventurers actually want, these items are basically the top tier, where a barter economy exists, or an economy of rare materials that are necessary to craft magic items can sometimes substitute.
Here’s personally how I would do it (and will do it if I ever get around to DM-ing): make copper pieces the equivalent of dimes (so they are tenths of a dollar), silver pieces are the equivalent of $1, include ELECTRUM pieces (which are .5 gold pieces in vanilla D&D) to be $10, have gold be $100, and platinum be $1,000
One big problem is just not having enough opportunities to spend money in many campaigns. I think that it also makes a big deal when it comes to spell-casting components, but also food, lodging, clothes etc.. When a campaign doesn’t really pay attention to that sort of stuff, which is quite common, it also means the gold isn’t used up very fast & just accumulates. As you touch on later, there aren’t so many ways people have to spend money that don’t feel cosmetic, but then on the other hand many players get upset when a DM is too crunchy. Another way to get around this is to have a quest to support a poor town/orphanage, or a villain that involves paying off a bribe, or something like that, so that money is leaving the players’ hands more often
My findings suggest that, given the current exchange rates, the value of 1 gold piece is equivalent to 51.35 USD currently due to 1 shilling from 1382 being equivalent in value to 41.84 pounds in current buying power (note: I found a resource with the ability to track things further back than the Reddit poster did), and the exchange rate yielding the USD amount stated above. That said, it’s also worth noting that the value of the GP seems to vary quite a bit depending on which medieval goods you base things on, which is probably the result of the commodity prices D&D uses being derived from the values of goods at different years– which is somewhat unavoidable, honestly, given how relatively spotty the records are. Honestly, though, that’s not that bad: $500, $50, $25, $5, and $0.50 coins being used is a pretty decent sort of system, if I’m being honest. Maybe there could even be multiple sizes of copper coins if you want to be fancy and actually have the value equivalent go down to 1 cent. Large = 50, Medium = 10, Small copper = 1, or something like that. **shrug**
I make sure players always have something to do with that money. It is part of why I love running naval campaigns. Ships cost a fortune, you need to pay your crew, you need supplies. Crafting is heavily encouraged and streamlined. You need to outfit your crew, make repairs…there is always a money sink available to the players.
My apologies in advance for the long post … I think the idea of “What would each economic tier use as currency?” is the question you should be asking. The first part is establishing the tiers. Sure, you have rich, middle class, and poor. But you also have royalty, who would be the Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Arabian shahs, and Crown of England from 1400 – 1700 type wealth. But you also, for example, have successful guildsmen and retired adventurers, who may in part comprise an Upper Middle Class – they have means to have disposable income for non-necessities. So in my games, the general approach I take is: – A royal-based tier would use things like land, art, artifacts, titles, and platinum as modes of currency. – Rich through upper middle class economic tiers use some land, art, platinum, but mostly gold as their currency. – Middle and lower middle class use denominational monies, mainly silver with a bit a of gold mixed in. – Poor use a mostly barter-based economy, copper, and a dabbling of silver for their economic transactions. The question I would have for your game is “Where did this orphanage get all this gold from?” Orphanages are generally not flush with money to spend on frivolities like wandering cut-throats masquerading as adventurers. Orphanages are generally not found in upper middle class through Royal economic tiers. Those orphaned in those tiers are brought by relatives or benefactors who gain access to the child’s inheritable wealth. Orphanages are for the children of low middle class and the poor; If they could pool together 100 copper, that would be pretty amazing.
The exchange rate I (personally) like changes the value of non-gold coins somewhat, but makes it a lot easier to visualize relative values, at least for me. 19th Century US coinage; 1gp is the equivalent of a $20 gold coin. 1sp equals a silver dollar. 1cp can be a penny, so the progression is 1gp=20sp=2,000cp…. but I took it one step further and developed a 4th coin: Tin (colloquially, a “Tinny”), which is used exclusively in the most destitute portions of the city. With this, you make a cp = a dime, and a tp = a penny, making the progression 1gp=20sp=200cp=2,000tp. Of course, you then have to alter the cost of smaller goods and services, which maybe some GMs won’t be all that eager to do – And this I “fixed” by degrading costs for less expensive things down on level (so book price for 1cp = 1tp, but only in that part of the city, with the understanding that A) the quality is equivalently lower, and B) only the lowliest goods and services are even available where Tinnies are used as specie).
I DM for young kids, we started when they were around 6 and the group is now in middle school. Converting gold to dollars was very necessary when DMing for little kids because they don’t really appreciate money yet, so introducing a new currency was a non-starter. I decided on $20 for 1 gold. That made a silver $2 and a copper about a quarter. My players could wrap their heads around that. An added bonus was that it required a bit of math so it helped build good mental math skills when they were in grade school. I based my conversion rate on a glance through the equipment table. A lot of the stuff that was listed for one gold was stuff I figured an average person would pay about $20 for. Some of the copper math gets a little fiddly but that’s ok. My favorite thing about backing gold with dollars is when I tell my players what their reward will be for a quest and I see them doing the mental math then their faces all light up lol
I use to think about the value of coin in these settings and came to this as an universal standard 1 silver = 5$€ 1 gold = 60 silver = 300$€ A farmer can expect to make 1 silver a day, with food being cheap enough that this can support ~1.8 people, women and children would work too, with a family of 5 members earning together 3 silver. Doing numbers they could save 6 silver a month for clothing and emergencies
I feel like the biggest problem with money in dnd is the desperity between high outlet and low outlet. Like, dnd has various equipments, rations, fees and stuff players can buy and spend on, such as daily meals, places to stay at night and general equipment for adventuring, but all that costs like, 2 silver pieces, 5 copper, 1 gold piece per item, its cheap, so if you make them have to actually think about how theyre spending in these things, theyll never buy anything more fantastical, such as magic items, that can cost thousands of gold pieces, and if you give them enough to buy magic, theyll never have trouble with mundane spendings. Theres nothing in between that players can spend but have to think about how to spend
This is a good idea, considering in my most recent campaign Dm said “Yea that fair” to me and the wizard convincing people we can heal them of a fake ailment made from the wizard Minor Illusion and charging them 100 GOLD, for a paladin to go “yo sup bro you feeling bad? want me to help? Aight bet 100 gold.” and one dude said sure; i mean the other guy we asked made my paladin shit himself in Nat 1 Intimidation check before he threw me across the tavern, bashed a table atop my head, bitch slapped me and overall made me feel like the loki to his hulk. but the other dude coughed up 100 GOLD. That is FIFTY TIMES the cost of staying in the tavern which was 2 gold a person
Imma do it…but then also must be setting prices myself…because the 5e phb doesn’t make sense for something like the price of a shovel or a sword…also my world basically has techno/arcana cell phones(D20 rip off gems), tv’s (magic portals broadcast around my realms) etc… But it grounds the entire idea…if is 20 dollars to are giving to a homeless guy on the street, or how much food costs, ETC it gets everyone more or less on the same page.
What I did was scrapped the standard D&D currency, and used medieval British currency based on the pound sterling. The replacement for GP was a Silver Crown, basically the Pound Stirling, which was sterling silver. SP was the Shilling (more copper than silver) CP was the Penny I also had Haypennies (half pennies) and Farthings (quarter pennies). Actual gold was used for the Gold Royal, which was worth 100 Silver Crowns. By the way, I like that you brought up paper money, because the Chinese invented banknotes in the 7th century AD, slowly introducing them until they were widely accepted in the 13th century AD. They had copper coins out the wazoo that were cumbersome to carry around, so these banknotes were printed to be worth rather large sums of coins at a time. At any time, you could exchange these notes at a bank with a processing fee of 1 copper coin per note and receive its value in coin.
I use the 1 gold = 100 bucks exchange rate, but what I do differently is that I don’t give my players prices in specific coin types, I give its cost in “coin,” which they can pay with whatever currency they have on them. “How much is this book? 15 coin? Alright, here’s a silver and 5 copper.” Pulling out a shiny gold piece is akin to whipping out a nice crisp Benjamin. When players earn money, I give them the value in coin. I only bother with specific kinds of coins are used if I have a reason to for story or flavor, such as an NPC employer plunking down 1 gold coin for each PC at the table. My players are accustomed to thinking of money in “coin” now and it works great.
I definitely agree more with the commenter you quoted. One copper piece should be about $1 US. Those quests from an orphanage should be rewarding PCs in copper or silver pieces. I really dislike that silver and copper are essentially worthless. I also dislike that electrum – which has historically been the sign of advancing civilization – is ignored. I’d much rather see the economic inflation 5e introduced walked back the way PF2 did. Silver and copper should be used and useful, particularly throughout tier 1.
One loaf of bread is 2copper in 5e. An average loaf of bread in the US is $3.99 so we will round to $4. So 1 Copper is $2. 100 copper = 1 gold. 2×100 = 200. So, 1 gold is approximately equal to $200. See, gold in DND 5e fluctuates. If I wanted to buy a full suit of armor (plate) it would be around $3,000. In 5e that same suit of armor would cost 1,500 gold. 1,500×200=300,000. It is very hard to find the absolute value of things in a fictional world when the pricing is not stagnate. I personally make up the prices of everything everywhere the party goes so it adds an economy to the game that differs from city to city.
0:30 Dude, that is 100% on the DM. Apparently most people playing dnd care way more for magic items and stuff than gold but that is tbh not even realistic. Most people care for money and even if they don’t focus on making it they still like getting and saving it it. Even adventurers need a rainy day fund once they get too old or too sick or injured (or cursed or something). An adventurer (i.e. anyone going on an adventure regardless of what class, background, etc.) may also lose all or most of their magic items and with a lot of gold you they could buy good replacements. Not to mention adventurers only ever caring about adventure and never about the future is only something PCs without good roleplay do. And then it’s money spent and gained, the DM decides this and it’s all on the DM whether you get a ton of gold and have to spend very little or if it’s the opposite and you constantly struggle to pay the inn fee or buy a single potion Why did you get so much money so easily? Normally making money is really hard and even if you take quests and get paid, do you just luckily stumble upon manageable quests without any competition to drive the rewards down? Cause you’d think in a world with dnd (or other system)classes where people can become super strong that there would be quite a lot of them doing this to make money which means that even small villages may not be desperate and won’t be 100 gold but only 25 since even if they’d have to send someone to a bigger city it to fetch an adventurer to do their quest it would only cost them like 40 gold and the only reason the PCs are getting this job is because it’s easier for the village, not because the villagers have no one else to turn to.
Ive never played dnd, but something that has always bothered me wirh crpgs is carry weight. A party of four will pretty much never run out of carry space, you can loot fucking everything and be rich after just 2 dungeons. A) it makes no sense from rp perspective and b) it makes gold worthless. Instead figure out a system that makes it to where carrying something that isnt equipped(even something as light as an expensive dagger that you found) cumbersom. You should only be picking things up if you are replacing equipment, it is an item that you need, or is something of very high value that is worth carrying around.
Totally agree with this idea. I understand the need to simplify things in a d&d game for speed, but most purchases take place in down time, and gaining wealth feels more rewarding if the currency is set to a more common use standard, and coins given names and even denominations. For example, I divide all gold item costs by 90, and it’s becomes the smallest of 3 silver coins. There are also 2 copper denominations and 3 gold coins My “1 gold coin” is that smallest silver coin, and it’s value is based on the daily wage of an untrained worker, a coin with a hen on it, called a Henny. Why do I think this is better? Well instead of saying, you’ve found 50 gold coins (which feels like it means nothing) you might say, you find 20 silver Henny (worth 20 days common wages), 3 silver Grave (the next silver coin worth 15 days wages each) and 1 gold Oxcart (aka an Oscar, the smallest of 3 gold denominations worth 3 months common wages) Consider, it makes flashing a gold coin more enticing. You might find a heavy chest of coins filled with copper Songs (1/10 a Henny) and need to find a money changer. You might need to change your hundreds of heavy silver coins into some traveling gold that you can hide on your person. It always bothered me that finding a gold ring or necklace was dumb, as melting it down it would likely be less gold than a single gold coin in value. Now jewelry is meaningful because you’re wearing a gold amount on your finger or neck, and gold is actually worth something.
The problem with D&D is that it’s economic structure is a joke. An unskilled laborer makes 1sp per day but building a tavern costs thousands of good pieces meaning you will never see a return on investment. To fix this change the general cost in gold of everything that is not magic to silver and have silver be what the average person uses as currency with only nobles using gold regularly. Magic is still has a gold cost, which is why the average commoner will treasure a potion of cure wounds because they can’t afford 25 or 50 gold but can feed their family with a basic meal of 1cp and a cheap beer 1cp and can pay the herbalist for nonmagical remedies using silver.
At 0:33 you asked why D&D is like this. The answer you’re not looking for is D&D’s money economy is intentionally designed to be broken. Game economies by design need to be fun to engage with, to favour the player, and to be simple enough to understand. Real economies are the opposite of these things. Another way of saying this is a fun economy is directly proportional to how exploitable it is. D&D has a single currency economy so making scarce resources purchasable with money makes the economy actually feel more broken, but that’s not even the worst part. Since player time is separate from character time, controlling the player’s access to money is difficult without compromising verisimilitude. The solution is to separate scarcity from the money economy as much as possible. Ensure the best parts of your game provides the most sought after rewards, and allow no loopholes around this. Players will optimize the fun out of your games if you allow them, and it’s our GM duty to protect them from themselves.
I think there is importance to the tiers of money as well, though. While a decent approximation would be 1 copper = $1, 1 silver = $10, 1 gold = $100, and 1 platinum = $1000, there needs to be a separation. Copper is for the poor, silver is for the modest, gold is for the wealthy, and platinum is for the nobles and royalty. You will never see a noble playing copper for something, even if he overpays. He doesn’t carry copper on him. Silver or even gold to a noble is the equivalent of what copper is to a farmer. You will never see a farmer pay in gold or platinum. He may have 1000 silver, but he will never see a gold piece. It’s out of his reach for his social class.
This is something I have also struggled with, and so I looked at history. Historically (until about 1950) gold by weight was 20x the cost of silver. In today’s values, silver is about $20 US per ounce. So, the D&D silver coin (about 1/3 oz or 10 gm) would be “worth” about $7 US today. In early 1900’s USA the average salary was around 25 cents per hour (or one silver quarter for around 1/6 oz). D&D 5e quotes a “laborer salary of 2 Silver pieces per day” or about 20 gm of silver, $15 US for today’s silver prices. So, I look at different sizes of coins to make the D&D prices work and make sense. I also reduce the treasure amounts expected from the DM guides. I make the D&D silver piece about the size of a US half dollar (assuming it is not very pure, but quite thin). I give most player costs in Silver piece amounts, but assume there are 1/2 SP silver coins the size of a US quarter. This makes the Gold piece about 1/6 oz, 5gm and the size of a US nickel or UK Pound (and thin). This is similar to a US $5 gold from the year 1911. It is such a small coin that I use it as a value, but when treasure is found I tell players they found gold in 8 gold piece coins (or gold dragons, or whatever flavor for the area they are in). Copper, there is no reason that it is as valuable as a 1/10 silver, so I have made the copper coins large with one Copper Piece the size of a US silver dollar, or UK 50P commemorative coin. I also assume that there are fourths or farthing coins smaller than a full copper piece.
With no fact checking, the value of gold should be about the same in every currency, that’s why we used to have the gold standard as a guarantee for money. Then divide it in to 100 silver is 1 gold and 100 copper is one silver. Whenever people want to buy stuff, look up how much it costs in real world money and that’s the price. It does create one issue because a magical sword would probably be like 7 million gold. But who could afford a magical sword in this economy anyways?
If you gave 7 players a total of 301 gp, it would come out even. Also, long ago, in Gygax’s second frpg, Dangerous Journeys, he suggested what you are. The main currency, whatever you call it, is equal to $1 or whatever. So everything the pc’s need is understandable by comparing it to modern prices. And all tech is relative. A horse might cost what a motorcycle costs, a fine sword the same as a gun, and so on. And I should say, originally, D&D wasn’t intended to make the pc’s rich easily. There were a lot of rules and guidelines for expenses, upkeep, etc. They weren’t supposed to just keep it, consequence free. Life is expensive.
I’ve always counted where copper was 1$ silver was 10$ and gold was 20$. Because 10 copper was 1 silver and 10 silver was 1 gold. Because commonly people have about 30-40$ in their wallet or purse. Which would be about a gold and some silver. But people who didn’t have credit cards would have a couple hundred on them. So about 10 gold.
Before perusal the article, here’s what I’d do: Give yourself a CLEAR comparison. One of the biggest issues is not “feeling” the worth of money in the campaign. That said, if I were to use a Gold/Silver/Copper system, then I’d just do it like this: 1 Copper (c) = 1 Cent 1 Silver (s) = $1 (100 cents) = 100 Coppers (AKA 100 Cents) 1 Gold (g) = $100 = 100 Silver = $100 So I’d use this, and think to myself “How much would this cost irl?”, and apply that price. And I’d only change the price of stuff that I think would have just a different value in a medieval/fantasy setting. For example, food is more difficult to come by to, so naturally its price would be higher. I could test it out, and increase the price of food by 20%, for starters. So, something that you’d need $1 for would be $1.20, AKA 1 Silver and 20 Copper (or 120 Copper). I’d also add Exchange Offices, so that you find value in having change, and sometimes wanting more of it. (ofc, if I wanna go a bit more in-depth) Granted, it would be a base idea, but it’s not a bad starting point. And it works better than just giving a bare approximation. Additionally, you can always take into account several factors: 1. IRL, we pay for so much shit, so we almost never get 100% of our salaries for just ourselves, and our fun, as a lot of it goes on bills, food, taxes, etc., so you can always make that more of a thing; 2. Another thing that never seems to matter is “having a home”. You can always just sleep in a barn, or a Tavern, and not care.
Here’s the thing about gold in 5E. It’s a holdover from earlier editions. To maintain power progression in earlier editions, you needed magic items and they cost a lot of money. Players complained about how frustrating it was to have to be a walking magic shop to remain powerful at higher levels. Responding to that criticism, Wizards designed 5e to focus on making character classes be what makes characters powerful rather than the character gear. The problem is now, if you’re not buying gear, what do you do with gold? That’s a nut they haven’t yet cracked. However, that’s why it’s a problem. Personally, I find that if you just take out the gold pieces from treasure drops and just give them the art and gems, that fixes the problem.
I find it Harder to make Gold in dnd 5e than Pathfinder 1e, yet the good items in 5e is worth way more than in Pathfinder (except low level magic items), and in Pathfinder there are SEVERAL things you can spend gold on that isn’t low level (trash for the level) equipments and easier to get upgrades for your curent equipments. In 5e i literally just copy paste PF 1e equipments, a goild coin is worth about the same in both while being harder to earn in 5e as well becoming more worthless quicker the with the more need you to get better equipments (As in a +3 sword costing something like 200.000gp while in Pathfinder i already own a +5 sword and armour or even just a +10* sword)
The problem isn’t so much as perceived value of gold as much as what that gold get you. For example, in Warhammer fantasy gold is rare, good quality weapons cost gold, poor quality weapons that is within reach for players to buy can go for silvers but will probably be most of their silver as well. In DnD problem with gold is how things scale. Basic armours cost up to like 75 gold. Then comes the three huge jumps of breastplate, half plate and full plate. So with the DnD talking about how peasants make a few gold a day it would mean that a Smith that managed to sell two full plates a year could live quite well for the rest of the year. And while yes, full plate does take time to make, but an experienced armourer can crank those out at quite a high pace if he’s using apprentices that does the basics for him, which was common practice. So because of these huge jumps of costs from basic, practically starting gear stuff, to the next step up being about 10-20 times more expensive players need to earn a lot of gold to make progress. In a party of five players the party must earn 7500 gold split even before the fighter can upgrade to full plate. Half that amount for the half plate, but that also means they would need to earn another 375 gold before upgrading to the full plate. On the other hand, there are a lot of classes that does fine without huge amounts of gold. Rogues, barbarians, sorcerers, most clerics, warlocks etc. Basically any class without full plate can do quite fine with starting gear and a few bits and bobs added.
Dnd and balance do not go together. 1 silver is a decent meal, implying gold is about $50-100. But then an hourglass is 25 gold, implying gold is at most $1. Then a legendary item that grants wishes is worth 100,000 gold which could be billions. And then legendary padded shirt which is the equivalent of any leather armor is also 100,000 gold so maybe like a thousand in total. But infinite water or other resources resources that immediately solve world hunger, yeah those are all uncommon items so let’s call it 200 gold
So like everything in D&D, it depends on your DM. A 5GP Inn stay could exist, but I would expect it to be a very very bougie Inn, with large rooms and servants and the best food and drink in the land. A 100GP reward could make sense for an orphanage too. That could’ve been the majority of their budget to maintain the orphanage. Maybe they were intending on using that money to make on improvement (having recently redone my bathroom 10,000 dollars is a reasonable estimate to get contractors to do a medium sized project). I don’t think I would like a 1USD=1Dollar. I am fine with the rates the book has. D&D starts characters off with gold and valuable in starting items and starting gold. Generally your level 1 characters have some, not a lot, of spending money and characters can pawn items off if they are really desperate for coin. My problem is that there is nothing in the PHB or DMs guide for players to spend gold on, so the acquisition of wealth doesn’t translate to player power making gold an irrelevant reward for most characters. I think Strongholds is a great solution for this. I havent played with it yet, but kinda can’t wait.
I saw that reddit post and it’s not really correct in many of it’s assumptions. Mainly in the fact of it’s based on the cost of goods, but not on the buying power of money and salaries. There was a great comment to it though, from 5 years ago by deleted account (it has a table in it), which came to 20$ per gp. I personally prefer 10$ since it makes it easier to track, but still, 100$ is waaay too much. And your solution work too! Just making it as valuable as you need so that everyone understands what you are talking about is a great solution.
I personally use copper as equal to a US penny ($0.01). 100 copper = 1 silver ($1.00). 100 silver = 1 gold ($100.00). 10 gold = 1 platinum ($1,000.00). So a beer would cost like 5 silver. A night at an inn would 1 gold per room. A nice breakfast for a party of 5 would cost 1-3 gold depending on if they have adult drinks or not. Inflating the price to a factor of 100 instead of 10 just makes more sense in our society where our money is in factors of 100. The exception being platinum as $1,000 makes more sense than $10,000. It makes it more relatable and gives it some concept to grasp in reality. This does mean, however, that almost every item in the game needs to be price adjusted. But it’s easy enough to equate it to a real-life price and just go from there. Ain’t no way a spyglass is 1,000 gold. That’s $100,000. Bring that down to 50 silver, maybe 1 gold for a really nice one.
Depending on the fantasy setting but the economy is always super broken. A gold per day is considered very good living standard costs and also yeah is 100 coppers. I do what you do, I treat gold as though it were $1.00 per gold piece. It’s understandable and now that 50 gold light heal potion or 1,500 gold platemail makes sense to modern players.